The Red Weed From Mars

In its native southern Africa
It is beautiful and rare
But a curse in poor Australia
That fills us with despair

Escaping from a garden
So English and so neat
It marched across the country
Leaving wasteland at its feet

Where once was biodiversity
A monoculture stands
Sickly pink and hideous
And a blight upon the land

Gladioli and Watsonia
And sweet Salvation Jane
Brought here in ignorance
And causing untold pain


There is an old maths question that is great for kids. If a waterlily doubles each day and takes 29 days to cover half a pond, how long will it take to cover the whole pond? The answer of course is 30 days and therein lies the problem with environmental weeds. Their spread is initially slow and insidious and we hardly notice them until one day we look at on a sea of sick Pink Gladioli and wonder where it came from. By then of course it is too late to do much about it.

We have few weeds on our property but Pink Gladioli are trying hard to get a foothold. At this stage they are mainly confined to the firebreaks and in low numbers, or so we thought until we went around pulling them out in their hundreds yesterday. Often the bulbs break off so it will be the work of some years to rid the place of this curse but at least the flower heads with their thousands upon thousands of papery wind-borne seeds are gone.

Gladioli are a curse but not the worst one by far. Thickets of Watsonia and Arum Lilly choking our waterways and the purple fields of Salvation Jane now more aptly namely Paterson’s Curse are far worse, at least for now, but the pretty aromatic Pink Glady’s are bad enough. They are outcompeting the magnificent Red and Green Kangaroo Paw, Blue Leschenaultia and thousands of other sand plain species in Western Australia’s biodiversity hot spot and doing untold damage.

And the key question is why? Just because some settler homesick for merry England and oblivious and dismissive to the native beauty in abundance around them wanted something pretty to look at. And inevitably they escaped from the gardens and with no natural controls have wreaked havoc. But the saddest thing of all is that it is still happening. We have learned little! There is growing awareness about potential environmental weeds but gardens and nurseries throughout the country continue to propagate a huge variety of plants from all corners of the globe. Our next major invasive weed, and possibly our next 10 are likely already to be growing in someone’s garden.